Heinrich Böll - born 100 years ago today.

This is a short post to mark the birth of Heinrich Böll 100 years ago today.

Heinrich Böll (1917-1985), image source

The German writer, Heinrich Böll, was born in Cologne 100 years ago today. He was conscripted into the German army before the outbreak of the Second World War. After the war, he returned to Cologne and took up the studies that he had begun before the war - Germanistics and Classical Philology. He then started to write short stories and his first book, The Train Was On Time, was published in 1949.

He is well known in Ireland because of his influential Irisches Tagebuch [Irish Journal]. The book focused on his time on Achill Island, off the west coast of Ireland in the 1950s. Böll created an image of Ireland in the book that many of his fellow Germans took as their image of Ireland. I have not read it yet, but am looking forward to reading it at some stage to see an Ireland that is no longer visible.

Böll won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972. You can read his biographical sketch on the Nobel Prize website. There is also an interesting piece on the Goethe Institut website about Heinrich Böll and Ireland.

An Irishman's Diary on Hugh Murphy

Like many thousands of his fellow countrymen, Irishman, Hugh Murphy (1889-1916) fought in the British army during the First World War. He was a member of the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Rifles. Sadly, he died at the front and was buried in a small cemetery in a rural part of Northern France.

It is estimated that about 200,000 Irishmen signed up to fight during the war, as well as numerous expatriates in Britain, the empire and the USA. 43 Irishwomen signed up for the Women's Land Army by late 1917. This represented one-thousandth of the total. [David Fitzpatrick in Roy Foster's The Oxford History of Ireland, p. 194, 195.].

Entrance to Laleu cemetery, where Hugh Murphy is buried.

Read my Irishman's Diary article in today's Irish Times newspaper about his story. Hugh Murphy's grave in Laleu cemetery is cared for by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. If you are looking for details of a grave of a family member who died during the war, you can find some really interesting details on their website. Follow this link to see information about Hugh Murphy's grave and nearby graveyards containing the graves of other soldiers.

Hugh Murphy's gravestone.

Living conditions at the front must have been very hard to bear for the soldiers. When Hugh Murphy's battalion made it to northern France from warm and sunny Aden (modern day Yemen) where they were based prior to the war, a very harsh winter had set in. Food was also an issue. By 1918, the British were sending 30 million kg of meat to the Western Front every month. Check out this page from the Imperial War Museum to see what soldiers ate at the front.